We Need Protests. And Paintings.

Oaxacan murals by the Tlacolulokos artist collective in the Los Angeles Central Public Library.CreditEmily Berl for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — I am often told that Los Angeles is a “third-world cesspool,” a line of bigoted criticism that refers to my city’s immigrant population. This attitude far predates the contemporary debate over the fate of Dreamers — it’s fueled not just by political rhetoric but also by artistic portrayals that have long been misleading or lacking.

The powerful culture industries of this city have done little to undermine the idea that the real Los Angeles — the place where its swarthy masses live — is a place of violence, fear and backwardness. Film and television, especially, have done an incredibly poor job of portraying the Los Angeles immigrant Everyman and communities such as Huntington Park, which is more than 97 percent Latino and as proudly Mexican as some parts of Boston are proud to be Irish.

The average José or Juana we Angelenos know well is now a fixture in cities and towns across the United States — a Mexican Willy Loman in the Bronx or a Salvadoran-American Norma Rae punching a time clock at a chicken-processing plant in Alabama. But the absence of people like them from mass culture allows many of our fellow Americans to cling to the idea that immigrants — especially black and brown ones — don’t belong.

To defend the place of millions of immigrants and their progeny in American society, we need not only protest of political changes but also more art. We need to bring the ambitions, the foibles and the soul of immigrant America into the collective American mind. And for that we need television shows and movies, and more novels, poems, paintings and songs. High art and low.

We need stories told in Spanglish and Korean slang, and erudite English, and in bright and moody colors by artists who represent the sons and daughters of the African, Latino and Asian diasporas.

An explosion of American cultural expression with roots in the Global South has already begun. Call it the “diaspora renaissance.” You can read it in the fiction of Junot Díaz and the poetry of Aracelis Girmay, whose family roots are in Eritrea, California and Puerto Rico. You can see it in the restaurant reviews of the food critic Jonathan Gold, whose writings have shown Los Angeles a truth sitting right here before our noses — that humble cooks from distant countries are some of the city’s greatest geniuses.

This movement is alive in New York at the Public Theater, where the Los Angeles playwright Luis Alfaro presented his barrio-centric reimagining of a Greek tragedy, “Oedipus el Rey.” It’s thriving in the rotunda of the Los Angeles Central Public Library, before a series of larger-than-life portraits of local residents with roots in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

The subjects of “Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A.” wear the dress of the Zapotec Indian people — and Doc Martens and Dodger logos. The artworks were created by the Zapotec art collective known as Tlacolulokos, and the subjects have a way of being that is equal parts Mexican tradition and American hip-hop. Their subjects carry smartphones and live surrounded by lines of Zapotec poetry and portmanteaus of English, Zapotec and Spanish names, including “Oaxacalifornia.”

The presence of those images in the city’s most important shrine to learning and culture was a momentary antidote to the deportations and the insults. Angelenos looked at these proud, painted men and women, and felt our spines stiffen for the fights to come.

Art and culture might seem like a luxury at this dark moment, with the Trump administration’s announcement that 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived here legally since 2001 will be forced to leave, and with young Dreamers brought to this country when they were just children left to face an uncertain status after the government reopened without Congress securing protections for them.

But when a people see their humanity denied, art is a defense of that humanity. Perhaps President Trump understood this when he proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities last year.

The history of Latino diaspora art in Los Angeles shows that even small, local works can produce big cultural shifts. In the 1970s, a group of Los Angeles artists at the barrio gallery Self-Help Graphics wanted their community to celebrate the beauty of Mexican culture. So they worked to recreate Mexican “Día de los Muertos” (Day of the Dead) traditions in Los Angeles, starting with events in East Los Angeles parking lots.

“Everyone was trying to discover their roots, who they were,” the artist Linda Vallejo told me last fall at a retrospective on the gallery’s four decades of Día de los Muertos work. Those artists helped make Day of the Dead, with its marigolds and sugar skulls, the newest addition to the pantheon of American ethnic holidays.

This normalization of Latino and immigrant culture is an essential act in the Trump era, a time when I’ve heard stories about white school kids yelling “Trump!” at their brown-skinned classmates as if it were a slur meant to remind them of their inherently second-class status. Resisting the spread of hatred requires all sorts of actions. Go to a march, call your representative — but also bring a great work of literature by an immigrant writer to your book club and support arts education everywhere.

When we feel powerless to stop the hatred and injustice directed at our people, we should remember art’s potential to enlighten the uninformed and to slowly eat away at prejudice.

This has happened before in the United States. In the early decades of the last century, during the depths of Jim Crow, with its lynchings and de jure segregation, the Harlem Renaissance was born. It was a cultural prelude to a civil rights movement that changed the very notion of what American identity is.

I feel a renaissance coming. I see it in the discipline and ambition of our young people. They eat Oaxacan mole and Korean kimchi, and they read, joke and create in Spanish, Amharic, Creole and Arabic. But above all, they also employ the same language used by James Joyce and James Baldwin: English, spoken with accents from the Midwest, New Jersey and East Los Angeles, and all the other places they call home.

Héctor Tobar (@TobarWriter), an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of “Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free” and a contributing opinion writer.